We'll never agree on certs. HR is useless, they don't even know about the certs. The manager that's hiring usually provides the requirements and if your boss is handing out a list of certs to HR, you better start to look for another job. My boss just sends years of experience per systems and not specifics like 10 years HP-UX 11.23, which would be stupid if a AIX guy with 20 years experience wants the job. Generic terms are best for HR. Who cares if the guy knows Checkpoint and your internal Firewalls are all Cisco Pix. The guy knows firewalls, he knows PAT/NAT, he knows of concepts like Egress filtering, he knows how to build proper rules, he knows about IP networking as it applies to firewalls. Typing up configurations is the easiest part to learn, whether it be in the Checkpoint GUI or on a Pix ssh console.
Experience is key, diplomas second, certs dead last. I don't even mention any of the certs I did bother with anymore. Most of them are hogwash and most of the time, I never waste my time with the actual exam (work pays for the courses or material). Those that I do, I wouldn't want to be near responsible for systems which I'm certified for (ACIA comes to mind).
CCIE is a whole different matter. First it's not just some mindless written test after reading a few pages out of a book. It's an actual field test that lasts for a few days. It requires a lot of pre-requisites (CCNP or other Professional level certification) which in of themselves require a few pre-requisites themselves.
If you want to play the certification game, this is one of the top ones. And you can't read yourself out of it because of the field test that is required to pass. That's why you don't see CCIE in every sig in Outlook in your organisation. CCNA, A+, Net+ and all other 5 day courses + written exam certs don't mean squat. But I'm sure no one was suggesting to the OP to go for CCIE before knowing if he's even remotely interested in that level of networking...
Specialization is also nice. You may get a chance in your program to try both networking (routers, switches, etc) and sysadmin stuff. If you do, figure out which side you like. Specialization is good, but the reality is in many jobs, especially in smaller organizations, you end up being the jack-of-all-trades.
Smaller organizations tend to have smaller systems. Forget scalability, high availability or any kind of advanced systems/networking work there. 2 or 3 servers, mostly overpowered because they were the cheapest you could find anyhow, running some file sharing/domain controller/Exchange. Boring stuff if you ask me, and you're not really a jack of all trades, you're just a surface scratcher (yes, I did work in such a small organization for a few years, luckily, I managed to carve myself a nice niche doing their web hosting system administration and their VPN/DMZ customer integration, so I was still doing specialized work which led me where I am today).
I know I ragged on NOC operators/Call center monkeys earlier but they are a good starting point in this industry. Don't forget to seek out a specialty you like while you're sitting there staring at surveillance monitors or answering customers. Usually, organisations that have internal call centers/NOCs are good places to work for. The starting position gets your foot in the door and then you can graduate to systems administrator/network support/DBA/programmer/whatever as positions open up. Companies will usually promote internally vs hiring externally, so if you get yourself known as the "goto NOC guy", you have a good chance of being picked up by other departments. I've worked for 2 such organizations in the past and basically had my pick of what I wanted to do (I'm still at the 2nd one, having gone from NOC to systems admin).
School is one thing, but mostly in the end, you'll learn how to do Start->Run->dcpromo and that's about it. Read and try out stuff on your own. Building a Linux/FreeBSD box (not installing a distro and calling it a day) and actually using it as a desktop for 5+ years is what got me all the Unix knowledge that landed me my job, not some stupid Linux course (which had half of the material wrong anyhow) during my college years.
Heck, while I was doing customer VPNs at the smaller company I worked for, I even bought myself a Cisco Pix. A 501 cost me about 800$, but boy did I ever learn how it works. I could type up a configuration from customer specs in about 30 minutes without any documentation after about 6 months of playing around on mine and doing other customer's.
The fact is, IT is very large. You can work for smaller organizations all your life, supporting their 2 switches, PCs and 2 overpowered servers and you'd still learn about new stuff everyday. You can work for large organisation and specialized in a particular field and always be amazed about the amount of stuff you don't have a clue about and need other teams to help with to. You can try to go over everything and go into management (a possible exit place for jacks of all trades with managerial skills) or you can go into programming, which again, is a very very large field in and of itself.
Server virtualization is something very hot right now and will be for the foreseeable future. VMware is arguably the biggest player in that market... today. You can bet though that even the VMware 'experts' are learning, experimenting and trying other platforms like Xen, Hyper-V, OpenVZ, etc. They are constantly on the lookout for the next big evolution.
If they were to tie themselves solely to VMware and only 100% focus on that, what happens in 3-5 years (or less) when something else could totally revolutionize the market? They either race to learn that new technology or try to live off supporting the ones who won't abandon it and that only lasts so long. Are you willing to bet your career that VMware is always going to be dominant player? I certainly wouldn't try to predict that with any product, company, platform, programing language, etc.
This is very right. Learn Unix, not Solaris/HP-UX/AIX. Learn networking, not IOS/Juniper. Learn firewalls, not Checkpoint/Pix. Learn SAN, not Brocade/McData/Cisco. This goes back to the cert thing. Certs are mostly about vendor products and vendor specialisation. They teach you how to answer the questions as asked by the vendor (what port does the Arcsight Manager use to talk to connectors ? Who cares, I can always identify it on the fly and in my installation, maybe I didn't use defaults anyhow).
This is what I mean by specialize. If you ever want to do more than surface scratching, pick a domain and master, don't pick a vendor or product.
I'm sorry to hear that. I hope you find something you love. There's certainly days where I could throw a <insert computer thing here> out the window and wish I was a strawberry farmer (just anything completely away from technology), but I always come back to it. The challenge and oddly at times the frustration keeps me interested.
Good luck -
Oh be honest, It's all the great 100,000$ toys we get to play with all day that keeps us coming back.
